Hollywood salutes 9/11 all-American heroes

The US has a long tradition of seeking catharsis through that most American of mediums: the movie. But when the trailers for United 93, the story of the flight that fought back on the country's darkest day, hit cinemas recently, reactions were sharply divided. Paul Harris and Alice O'Keeffe report on a film that is splitting audiences

When Elsa Strong saw a still picture from the upcoming movie United 93 she did not see an actress portraying a character. She did not see a scene from a film. Instead she saw a moment of terrible poignant tragedy from her own life.

That picture, which Strong stumbled across on the film's website, portrayed the moment Linda Gronlund made a desperate mobile phone call from aboard a doomed plane on 11 September 2001. By the time Gronlund dialled, United Flight 93 had been hijacked by Islamic terrorists intent on slamming it into the White House or the Capitol in Washington DC.

Those aboard already knew the fate of the other planes seized that day and were preparing to fight for their lives. It was a fight that saved Washington from another attack but saw the plane crash into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Gronlund was calling her beloved sister Elsa to say goodbye. 'She made that phone call. She was calling me. To see that moment in a film is quite a shock,' Strong said, still fighting back tears more than four years later.

Rarely have art and real life collided so dramatically as in United 93. As relatives of the dead and the entire American people prepare nervously for its release, the film has already raised fundamental questions about art and politics in the post-9/11 world. Is America ready for a major Hollywood film about 11 September? Especially one as raw and realistic as that created by the British director Paul Greengrass? Even the release of the trailer last week caused panic. Some applauded it. Others wept. Others were angry. Some cinemas pulled the trailer. Others continued to run it on more than 3,000 screens across America.

But behind the headlines lies a story of a remarkable co-operation between Hollywood and the relatives of the dead. It is of a film meticulously crafted to tell one of the most compelling stories of a day that changed the course of history. It is a movie where art and real life mix as never before. For Greengrass it was a chance to craft the first mainstream treatment of this defining event. For the families it was a chance to remember, to mourn and to celebrate the lives of those they lost.

The film opens in the same way as the day itself did. The sky is blue and cloud free. Flight attendants prepare the aircraft, passengers arrive at the airport, each with different reasons for catching United 93 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco.

Some are mundane: a business trip or a holiday. Others are life-changing: switching home from one coast to another. Four of them are deadly: hijacking the plane as part of the 9/11 terrorist plot. All of those lives end less than two hours later when the plane plummets from the sky.

For Greengrass making a film about this flight was key to understanding the world created by 9/11. By a quirk of fate United 93 was 40 minutes late taking off, getting into the air just moments before American Airlines Flight 11 smacked into the World Trade Centre. So when panicked United 93 passengers began calling from the air to say they had been hijacked, people on the ground were able to warn them of their fate. Unlike those aboard the other three planes, these passengers knew their captors were on a suicide mission. As a result they fought back.

The men and women aboard United Flight 93 were essentially the first people on Earth to live, albeit briefly, in a post- 9/11 world. 'Will we sit here and do nothing or will we do something to overpower the terrorists? That is a post-9/11 decision,' Greengrass told The Observer. 'The people on that plane underwent the transition from civilian to military in the context of this extraordinary situation.'

In some ways the film has been written by those on the flight. It was the phone calls made by the passengers that allowed the story of what happened to be pieced together. Added to that was information gleaned from the aircraft's flight recorder, which chronicled the events inside the cockpit as the passengers fought to get in and take back the plane from the hijackers.

Obviously no 100 per cent accurate record is possible and the film is unlikely to dispel some of the conspiracy theories that have arisen around the flight. But for both the relatives and Greengrass it is the message that is most important, and that message is the reaction of those on board.

'Those were people from all sorts of different backgrounds. They were regular people. But they all banded together to fight for their lives. They showed that courage,' said Gordon Felt, whose brother Edward died on board. 'A lot of people talk about closure. But there won't ever be closure for us and the movie won't change that. My brother was murdered in the most horrible way. You don't get over that.'

For Greengrass the transformation of the passengers from pre-9/11 to a post-9/11 world also has a powerful political message: 'It shows how the world became militarised as a result of this attack. If you are attacked, you defend yourself. It's one of the things that political violence does to a democracy.'

But the story of how the film was made is almost as remarkable as its content. Greengrass, best known for his previous work about Northern Ireland in Bloody Sunday and the gritty spy thriller The Bourne Supremacy, was considering his next project, a film of the graphic novel The Watchmen. But when that idea was postponed he gave himself a week to come up with a 9/11 movie. He eventually penned a 20-page treatment. That soon turned into a 90-page factual blueprint of the events around United 93, mostly culled from the 9/11 Commission report.

But Greengrass and Universal Pictures knew the project would be controversial and had to be done with the full consent of all the families of those who died. In an industry best known for its ruthlessness and mercenary ideals, that was a revolutionary idea. So began a remarkable outreach campaign which not only won that consent but also turned it into co-operation. Contacts were made through an organisation representing the families and meetings were held with relatives.

Much of the work was done by the film's indefatigable British researcher, Kate Solomon. But Greengrass and other top executives held many personal meetings themselves. They would sit for hours with individual family members, piecing together the events of the flight and building a picture of all those aboard.

'It is a meticulously researched movie. We've spoken to every family involved, every recipient of a phone call from that plane,' said Tim Bevan, co-director of Working Title films and producer of United 93.

Many of the actors spent time with the family members too, even going through old pictures and wedding videos to get to know the characters of the people they were playing. Much of the dialogue was improvised, using the information gathered from those family sources. That meant the actors had to immerse themselves in character, playing someone they knew was once alive but had died in such a terrible fashion. That led to an unusually traumatic time during filming. After many of the takes, as they showed passengers wrestling with what was happening to them and what to do about it, actors would walk off the set, shaken or in tears.

The same level of research also went into the roles of the four hijackers. The wardrobe room of the actors playing the terrorists was covered with pictures of Osama bin Laden and details about al-Qaeda. The actors studied the writings of Mohammed Atta, one of the five hijackers to crash the first plane into the World Trade Centre, and his instructions to the real-life hijackers in order to better play their roles.

The clear orders from the top were that everyone in the film, even the villains, were still humans. Such a realistic portrayal, even having the movie play out in the same real time as the actual events, is bound to anger some with such hypersensitive subject matter. 'I think that inevitably reconstructing an event like that will be controversial,' said Bevan.

The controversy has already begun. Last week a cinema in Lincoln Square, New York, pulled the film's trailer after it upset audiences. In one Hollywood cinema some audience members shouted 'Too soon!' as the trailer began.

Outside a New York cinema, however, there was a mixed reaction from those emerging from Spike Lee's film Inside Man. Before the film had started, mixed in with previews of The Da Vinci Code and Mission Impossible III, the audience had seen the United 93 trailer. 'It was not something I wanted to see. Why do they have to make a film about that?' said one angry man, who declined to give his name. But others were in favour. 'They were heroes. It's good to show that,' said Maurice Greene.

The trailer has finally opened the biggest cultural debate in America. Is the country ready to re-examine 9/11 through the ultimate American art form: the movie? At the moment the answer appears to be a hesitant 'maybe'. Certainly United 93, with its huge research and heroic subject matter, is treading a careful path through this cultural minefield.

'For the most part, America is ready for a film like this. After all, it is the one event of that day that had an ending which saved lives and thwarted the terrorists, even if the passengers all died,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at Syracuse University.

In fact, the flight has already received two dramatic treatments. Last year the A&E cable channel broadcast a TV movie, which was a huge ratings hit. The Discovery Channel has also shown a programme called The Flight That Fought Back

Perhaps more controversially will be future projects, most notably Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center which looks at the central attacks of 9/11 and stars a slew of top Hollywood names, including action star Nicholas Cage. 'United 93 avoids the sacred ground of lower Manhattan,' Thompson said. 'The Stone movie is not going to do that.'

Of course, America has been here before. The trauma of Vietnam went largely ignored by American movies while it was being fought and for years afterwards. Then, as America itself came to terms with the war's meaning, it was also depicted in films such as The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. 'There is a long and honourable tradition of making films that address compelling contemporary issues, from Vietnam to McCarthyism to terrorism... Is now too soon? I took the view that somebody had to start that process,' said Greengrass.

In fact a similar process is inevitable with 9/11, especially, as the ongoing quagmire of Iraq sours the national mood. 'In some ways these movies are reflecting a need to look back at why these other events started, to show American history in a more heroic light when it looks quite dark now,' Thompson said.

It was also always unlikely that Hollywood would ever ignore an event so full of drama, tragedy, evil and heroism. Such things are the stuff all movies are made from. On 23 September 2001, less than two weeks after the attacks, top film critic Richard Roeper wrote : 'Some day they'll even make a fictional, mega-budget blockbuster about the 11 September bombings.' That wait is over. The day has now come.

But for the families of the dead, arguments about the American cultural zeitgeist are meaningless. For them United 93 is a chance for their loved ones to live again on the silver screen as national heroes. Special screenings, closed to the public, are being set up for them. Elsa Strong will see her sister Linda Gronlund portrayed on the way to California to tour wine country with her boyfriend. For Gordon Felt it will be a chance to see his brother again. Edward Felt was a husband and father of two daughters. He was on his way to a business meeting.

They will watch them board the flight, they will see them fight their hijackers and then witness their deaths. No relative thinks that will be anything but traumatic. 'It is going to be incredibly painful,' Felt said. 'It will be graphic and it will be violent. But I want to see it. We need to remember them and the day America forgets those who died on that day will be a sad one. This will help stop that.'

Other films

It was inevitable that America would turn to TV and cinema to capture the shock and horror of 9/11. These are some of the main works:

Flight 93 This TV movie made for the cable channel A&E reconstructed the events on board United 93. It was a ratings and critical hit.

The World Trade Center Oliver Stone's story about two police officers rescued alive from the towers, starring Nicolas Cage, is the biggest Hollywood effort to look at the events.

Sorry, haters This art-house film, starring Robin Wright Penn, examines the relationship between a disturbed woman and an Arab cab driver as the disaster unfolds around them.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael's Moore's polemic was either loved or hated by Americans.